Student newspaper pulled over nude photo

Saturday

Prompting charges of censorship, Malone College in Canton, Ohio, this week removed hundreds of copies of its student newspaper from campus because that edition had a photo of naked male students.

Prompting charges of censorship, Malone College this week removed hundreds of copies of its student newspaper from campus because that edition had a photo of naked male students.

The seizure of the newspapers, distributed for free in several public areas on the Christian liberal arts college’s campus in Canton, Ohio, is believed to be unprecedented in recent memory. Malone serves approximately 2,300 undergraduate and graduate degree students.

“I was upset,” said Ruth Lang, editor-in-chief of The Aviso, which generally distributes 1,100 copies a week during the school year. “It was a bigger issue we had spent extra time on, and our work was being taken away, and it was being censored.”

Chris Abrams, Malone’s vice president for student development, said publication of the photograph violated the college’s decency standard.

School regulations, he said, prohibit the depiction of any nudity or even the implication of any nudity.

“I take very seriously their right to have freedom of expression,” said Abrams, who added that he struggled with the decision. “We weighed the students’ standards ... against our campus standards. ... In this particular situation (we) decided to pull the paper.”

Both vice presidents say because Malone, which is a private college, funds and owns the paper, they legally had the right to yank the newspapers.

Page 11 of Tuesday’s The Aviso has a black-and-white picture of four men posing naked in a hallway of Malone’s all-male dorm complex Penn-Gurney-Barclay. The photographer digitally blurred their faces and private areas.

The caption said that after a group of male students in January visited another floor of the dorm while nude, the complex’s resident director told students that this was inappropriate.

Papers were distributed around campus at 8 a.m. Tuesday. On seeing the photo, Abrams consulted other administrators; about 11 a.m. they instructed university employees to remove them.

On Wednesday, Abrams issued a new policy requiring all students to wear at least shorts when in public areas of the dormitories, even on their way to the shower. Abrams said he would consider changes to the policy with dorm staffers next week.

Abrams has also met with Lang, the student media board and Aviso’s faculty adviser, David Dixon, a professor of communication arts. Dixon has urged Abrams to redistribute the newspapers with the photograph. Abrams said the administration will consider that after Easter.

Lang, a 21-year-old Malone senior from Marietta, acknowledged that an Aviso photographer in February asked men in the dorm to take their clothes off and pose for the picture. She didn’t know if they were men who regularly walk around the dorm in the buff.

“I basically told him, get some nudity pictures. ... I didn’t tell him how,’” said Lang. “It’s not necessarily the best journalism. ... That shouldn’t be the reason to pull or censor our picture.”